Cognitive Radio paradigm has recently received considerable
interest to address the so called ’spectrum scarcity’ problem. In the USA,
the Federal Communications Commission recently issued the regulatory
for the use of cognitive radio in the TV white space spectrum. The primary
objective is the design of cognitive devices able to combine the
use of spectrum sensing, GEO-location and cognitive control channel to
manage the network. The recent standard ECMA-392 defines physical
layer and medium access control protocols to manage the network in a
fully distributed fashion.
In this work, we pursue the design of an efficient medium access control
protocol for the cognitive control channel to flexibly and reliability
exchange messages inside the cognitive radio network. Our main contributions
are the following: 1) we propose a proprietary medium access
control protocol based on the Standard ECMA-392; 2) we model the behavior
of the cognitive radio network by means of a urn model approach
and, 3) we investigate the ability of the cognitive devices to identify frequency
holes (accounting for perfect and imperfect spectrum sensing)
and we study the network throughput.